by Donovan Hohn
Tony Chan has a surprise for me. From storage, in anticipation of my visit, he’s retrieved a zinc-alloy die-cast mold. He places it on the floor, open, so that the two halves mirror each other, one cross-section of a duck floating on its reflection. Chan’s late father machine-tooled this particular mold. Machine-tooling molds is the most skilled and expensive part of the production process, Chan tells me. From my shoulder bag I brandish the yellow duck that Curtis Ebbesmeyer loaned me back in Seattle. Then I squat down and plug the thing into one of the zinc-alloy concavities in which, sixteen years before, with a single pneumatic blast, it had undergone a metamorphosis, transforming from yellow polyethylene goo into a hollow icon of childhood; from polymerized chains of carbon molecules into a marketable plaything. For a moment I half-expect some sort of cosmic magic to occur—rays of yellow light to come shooting from the mold, a portal to open in the space-time continuum. Instead, I just stand there muttering, idiotically, “Wow . . . Wow,” while behind me Po Sing’s perplexed managers look on and beside me an antiquated extrusion blow-molding machine operated by a youthful proletarian drips out new ducks one by one: psssht, clamp; psssht, clamp; psssht, clamp.
A zinc-alloy die-cast mold like this one, Chan explains, can produce 100,000 toys, three or four per minute, before it wears out. Steel molds, more expensive than alloy, can produce 500,000 pieces. Back in the autumn of 1991 when Po Sing received the order for that ill-fated shipment of Floatees, Chan’s family made a profit margin of around 10 percent. Now the margin is “much, much less.” Although he hasn’t made Floatees for several years, he estimates that a set of four plastic animals blow-molded from LDPE would wholesale today for around eighty cents. More than forty cents of that would go toward raw materials. The cost of materials has doubled in the past five years, Chan says, due largely to the rising price of plastic resin, a derivative of oil. The packaging is now, in January 2008, sometimes more expensive to make than the product. A plastic blister package can eat up 20 percent of production costs; a plastic clamshell, 50 percent. Rent in Dongguan is also on the rise. Chan’s family moved their plastics factory from Hong Kong to the mainland in the 1980s, but several years ago, when his lease expired, he had to relocate the factory again, to its current location. “First they invite us,” he says. “Then they make us move.”
Like his counterparts in Japan and Taiwan, Chan’s grandfather got into the toy business for economic rather than sentimental reasons. Toys, plastic toys especially, can be produced easily by unskilled workers, and the start-up costs are minimal. But for the same reasons, toymaking and similar kinds of “light industry” will always be vulnerable to competition from less-developed, less-expensive countries, which is why the toy industry has been at the vanguard of globalization. Henry Tong is convinced that he and other Chinese toy exporters are now losing business to factories in Cambodia and Vietnam. To compete, he and his compatriots will need to start making products with greater “added value,” products like electronic toys and video games.
Listening to him, I picture blow-molding machines and plastic ducks carried by a wave of outsourcing across the surface of the planet, from Massachusetts, where Ron Sidman’s parents started turning out playthings a half century ago, to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, then flooding the banks of the Pearl River Delta, before rippling northward to Shanghai and Beijing and southward toward Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam, leaving behind it both greater prosperity and greater economic disparity, higher crime rates but also, perhaps, if recent developments in China are any indication, stronger labor and environmental laws. In June of 2007, sensing that the proletariat was growing restless, Beijing enacted the most sweeping labor reforms in the history of China’s thirty-year experiment with capitalism, expanding legal protections for temporary workers and giving all workers the right to collective bargaining. In response, foreign companies threatened to take their business elsewhere, to more pliable labor markets.
Chan adheres strictly to China’s laws, he assures me, as well as to the divergent product-safety codes of America and Europe. But with American importers refusing to pay more for Chinese toys, even as production costs rise, he is not surprised that some of his misguided competitors have given in to the temptation to cheat. “It takes a lot to meet all the safety standards,” he says. “People complain about safety, but I don’t think we kill anyone”—he hesitates a moment, studying his shoes, measuring the wisdom of his words—“not like the Americans with their bombs.”
Given the openness with which he has welcomed me into his factory, I’m inclined to take Chan at his word. He seems like a sympathetic soul, trying to earn an honest living from his family’s small business so that he can give his kids an education at least as good as the one he received in New York three decades ago. There are no obvious signs of malfeasance on display in his factory. No child laborers. No suspicious fumes. No lead paint. No paint at all, in fact, since Chan outsources any surface painting he needs done. But the truth is, I really have no way of knowing what goes on in Po Sing when strangers with notebooks aren’t poking around.
Even if I could interview Chan’s workers in private, I wouldn’t know what to believe. In 2006, auditors from Wal-Mart visited a factory in Shenzhen that manufactures Bratz fashion dolls, the wildly popular, multiethnic, big-eyed, swag-loving contenders for Barbie’s throne. In anticipation of the inspection, management at the plant gave workers a cheat sheet, later obtained by the National Labor Committee, that listed exemplary answers to fifty-four hypothetical questions of the sort the auditors might pose, questions and answers likeQ: Does management pay attention to problems that are raised?
A: Yes. For example, if it’s too hot, the factory provides cold tea for the workers.
Q: Have you received or seen anyone receive unfair treatment? (Like fines, getting yelled at or hit?) How did it happen? Why was it unfair?
A: No.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to say?
A: No.24
Such documents alone do not incriminate China’s toymakers, the great majority of whom may well be law-abiding businessmen. But they do reveal one of the least appreciated resources that the Pearl River Delta has for the past thirty years offered Western companies looking to outsource production: secrecy—secrecy amplified by oceanic distances, protected by multinational corporations and Chinese factory owners alike, fortified by a language barrier higher than most Westerners can surmount.
The little I know about Po Sing is still far more than I know about the shop to which Tony Chan subcontracts paint jobs, or the plant that mixes his resin dyes. Not even corporate auditors or labor-group investigators or Chinese regulators always succeed in unraveling the Delta’s supply chain, a tangle of subcontractual relationships that can vanish into the warrenlike underground economy.
My tourist’s visa permitted two border crossings, and two days after visiting Dongguan, I would return to China unchaperoned, taking a high-speed ferry through Hong Kong’s seemingly endless port and then on, up the Pearl River.25 On the outskirts of Guangzhou, accompanied by a translator, I would pay an impromptu visit to a sofa factory in Long Jiang with which one of my translator’s former clients had done business. Like many so-called factories in China, this one was essentially preindustrial, devoted to a form of manufacturing that verged on cottage industry. There were no machines to speak of. Workers sat on bare floors hammering wooden sofa frames together or cutting out upholstery with shears. Slats of wood had been nailed across a broken window. There were cracks in the walls, cracks in the concrete beams overhead. Residents in a neighboring tenement had thrown trash into the narrow courtyard that ran behind the shops. From a crack in the facade of one workshop, plants grew. The splintered ruins of a wooden bench had been abandoned in a corner of the courtyard, and near it, someone’s laundry had been hung out to dry. I saw a mouse or else a small rat disappear into a drain. The factory’s owners, themselves migrants from the north who’d come to the Pearl River Delta in pursuit of prosperity,
did their business in spare, dusty offices, the windows of which seemed never to have been cleaned. The sunlight coming through them made ocher squares on the floor. In one office, old, unused cubicles were lined up against a wall, nested one into another like grocery carts, their presence suggesting that their former occupants had been swept away by a wave of administrative layoffs. Amy, my translator, introduced me to the owner’s son, James Liu, a chain-smoking twenty-six-year-old, who was boyishly excited to meet me. In his office, beside his metal desk, over which a blue ethernet cable ran from his laptop to an outlet in the wall, was a brand-new leather sofa that, nice as it was, seemed out of place. A customer had refused to pay for it, Liu explained. He had never been outside China, not even to Hong Kong, but he nonetheless liked America, he said, because American girls are beautiful.
Liu reminded me of something I’d read in Peter Hessler’s book. Those Chinese who had never visited America, Hessler writes, tend to take one of two extreme views of the place: either America is “evil incarnate,” or else it is the land of “wealth, opportunity, and freedom.” But there, in the littered courtyard of that sofa factory, trying to peer into a world that was still difficult to comprehend even after I’d glimpsed it with my own eyes, it occurred to me that American ideas about China have of late grown similarly extreme, similarly confused.
Back in the eighties, the People’s Republic played a supporting role in our popular culture. Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Vietnam, Tatooine—those were the foreign places my childish mind traveled to most often in movies and dreams. But then, sometime after Tiananmen Square and before 9/11, perhaps around 1998, when our growing trade deficit surpassed $50 billion, something changed. China began to cast a shadow and a spell over the American imagination. It opened its door, and our curiosity rushed in. Images of the new China proliferated in the media: futuristic skyscrapers and sporting arenas rose up among the sweatshops; SUVs and luxury sedans nosed like steel sharks through schools of bicycling proles whose clothes had turned suddenly colorful.
We no longer know quite what to make of China: Is it our ally or our enemy? Our rival or our doppelgänger? A repressive Communist oligarchy or the new century’s new land of wealth and opportunity? In a way, thanks to China, we no longer quite know what to make of ourselves. Finances alone can’t explain America’s current crisis of confidence. Our anxieties about China are also to blame: China has tested our cherished belief that democracy and the free market are mutually necessary, symbiotic; the one is impossible without the other. Its rise has given other developing nations an alternative. It shines like a red lantern unto the world, a boomtown on a hill. With mounting curiosity, as well as anxiety, we gaze west across the Pacific, searching the horizon for signs of our influence and forebodings of our decline. Economically, the European Union may yet pose a greater threat to our supremacy than China, and OPEC a greater threat to our sovereignty, but in the markets of the imagination the renminbi is now mightier than the euro, and Thomas the Tank Engine more menacing to our children than a tanker of Arabian crude.
During the 2007 toy scare, when the Pearl River Delta suddenly stopped keeping its secrets, a disenchantment occurred. We were reminded, to our dismay, that there really is nothing brand-new under the sun. It wasn’t merely the lead in the paint that scared us but the magnitude of our ignorance. In our children’s vulnerability, we glimpsed an exaggerated version of our own. Banished from the garden of solicitous and magically affordable delights, we began to shop suspiciously, xenophobically, checking the labels. Even familiar American brands, those old friends, seemed to have turned against us. There were enemies in the pantry, sleeper cells in the toy box. The Consumer Products Safety Commission was the new Office of Homeland Security.
It didn’t matter that American design flaws were to blame for most of the toy recalls, or that American toy companies, not Chinese factory owners, were the ones who’d profited most from China’s regulatory neglect, or that we consumers were its beneficiaries, or that the Chinese workers spraying the lead paint were the ones exposed to the greatest risk, or that recalled products represented a minuscule percentage of the flood of Chinese goods. Nor did it matter that the only life claimed by the tainted toys, so far as we know, was that of Zhang Shuhong, the director of a factory implicated in one of Mattel’s recalls, who one day in August, at the height of the scare, after instructing his managers to sell off all the machinery, ascended to his factory’s third floor, locked himself in a workshop, and hanged himself. No, what mattered was that the material world was no longer under our control. It disturbed us how much we’d come to depend on the industry of shadowy strangers.
But during the time I spent in China, I couldn’t shake the notion that I had traveled not into the future, which supposedly now belongs to China, but into some Twilight Zone version of America’s economic past. Much as the Erie Canal once connected the Port of New York to the mill towns of the interior, so the Pearl River now connects the Port of Hong Kong to the factories of Shenzhen and Dongguan. Even if the scale of China’s coastward migration is unprecedented, the phenomenon is not; similar economic forces sent immigrants and former slaves to America’s Rust Belt. Much as competition from the Port of Newark eventually idled Manhattan’s docks, so newer, cheaper ports up the Pearl River Delta have begun to draw business away from Hong Kong. It seemed to me more likely that a citizen of Hong Kong could catch a sneak preview of his future by visiting Manhattan, or a factory worker from Dongguan by visiting Akron (former capital of the rubber toy industry), than the other way around.
On the drive back to Hong Kong, Henry Tong tells me why he thinks his own economic future remains bright despite America’s declining consumer confidence: the confidence of China’s consumers is on the rise, and so is their disposable income. (Hong Kong’s toy sales in China increased 369 percent between 2005 and 2007.) To capture a share of this emerging market, Tong and his brothers recently started a retail chain on the mainland called Baby Creations. Not long ago, Chinese parents spent as little as possible on their kids, but those who’ve gained access to China’s burgeoning middle class “want to show off,” Tong says, and so they’ve started outfitting their children with the same sorts of accessories American parents buy—new clothes, designer strollers, fancy baby bottles that will no doubt require special baby-bottle brushes. Unfortunately for Tong, there is one American buying habit most Chinese consumers have yet to learn. Worried about deteriorating plastic, American parents will replace a baby bottle’s nipple every few months as instructed, Tong says. “But in China they’ll buy one nipple and use it for a year.” If only he can persuade them to throw away and replace, throw away and replace, the way Americans do. For now, more concerned about appearances than safety, they can be enticed by the fantasies that the bawds of consumerism peddle, but they remain indifferent to the fears. Soon, perhaps.
PLASTIC MAN
Back in the 1970s, when I was a child, rubber ducks were wilder than they are now. There was nothing iconic or nostalgic about them. The rubber ducks of the Nixon era were frequently white, some were calico. Some had swanlike necks and rosy circles on their cheeks. Some came with rococo feathers molded into their wings and tails. No one used them to sell baby clothes or soap. Normal adults did not give them to one another, or decorate their desks with them. So far as I can remember, no one I knew even owned a rubber duck. I did own one, however, on account of the pet name my mother had given me. Back then, before her breakdown and subsequent vanishing act, she liked to call my brother Benjamin Bunny. I, inevitably, was Donovan Duck.26
My own rubber duck was a somewhat hideous specimen, with white plumage, a green topcoat, a hydrocephalic head, and the gentlemanly posture of a penguin. It resembled a Hummel figurine that had sprouted a beak. In the bathtub, when squeezed, instead of squeaking, it shot water from the soles of its feet, a vaguely scatological feature that greatly amused my brother and me, though our preferred bath toys were Hot Wheels, which we’d drive in laps around the tub’s ri
m and launch Evel Knievel-style off our wet knees. Most exotic varieties of rubber duck have since gone extinct—they are the dodos and carrier pigeons of the nursery—and what new ones have evolved share a single, yellow ancestor whose pop-cultural apotheosis was by my toddlerhood already under way.
It had begun in 1970, when an orange puppet named Ernie appeared on PBS and said, “Here I am in my tubby again. And my tubby’s all filled with water and nice, fluffy suds. And I’ve got my soap and washcloth to wash myself. And I’ve got my nifty scrub brush to help me scrub my back. And I’ve got a big fluffy towel to dry myself when I’m done. But there’s one other thing that makes tubby time the very best time of the whole day. And do you know what that is? It’s a very special friend of mine. My very favorite little pal”—at which point Ernie reaches into the suds and, brandishing his yellow duck, bursts into song.
